Okay, if this isn’t the coolest picture ever taken of a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate ever, I’d like to see one cooler. Liu Xiaobo is so cool. He’s all Wazzzzzaaaaaap! (I assume he’s not flashing some butterfly-silhouette west-coast sign in response to Chinese authorities torturing him off-camera.)

And of course China’s being all Jessi Slaughter, like “d00D if you countries wanna front and go to the ceremony we’ll pop a glock in your mouth and make a brain slushie!” But the funniest article by far has been the Xinhua (Pravda of the Peoples’ Republic) article:

By enshrining a convict, the Committee pulled the old trick of trying to impose the Western values and political system on the rest of the world.

LOLZ. Hey China! Suharto called; he wants his ludicrous camouflage of brutal authoritarianism under the guise of anti-colonial struggle back!

WikiStuff

If you’re like me, when WikiLeaks starting blowing up, you were all “But are they really a wiki, like Wikipedia, all open to everyone?” Well, it turns out they’re not. But they were planning to be! Julian Assange put it like this:

It was our hope initially, because we had vastly more material than we could possibly go through, that if we just put it out there, people would summarize it themselves. That very interestingly didn’t happen – quite an extraordinary thing.

Our initial idea was: Look at all those people editing Wikipedia. Look at all the junk that they are working on. If you give them a fresh classified document about the human rights atrocities in Fallujah that the rest of the world has not seen before – a secret document – surely all these people that are busy working on articles about history and mathematics and so on, and all those bloggers …, will step forward, given fresh source material, and do something? No! It’s all bullsh**.

So he’s all cranky because not everyone wants to work on what he wants everyone to work on. Sorry, dude! Even Noam says you gotta go where your interests are!

Anyway, they switched away from the wiki model, but .. they kept the name! What’s up with that? Meanwhile, it’s causing some headaches and confusion for Wikipedia, since lots of people get them confused.

But Assange isn’t the only one trying to glimmer off Wikipedia’s shine! Check out Amazon’s pathetic weakness! All the info you could ever want to know about James Joyce (because they copied it all from Wikipedia), but enhanced with “shopping-enabled” links to his books on Amazon! I swear to Jebus I’m not making this up. They probably have a Balzac page, but I can’t find it and I’m tired and the XBox is calling for me.

Do not play Heavy Rain. That game is atrocious! I vomited for twenty minutes after finishing it in less than 24 hours. There are plot holes the size of lunar craters, controlling the people is very difficult, and some of the dialogue is completely ludicrous.

And look at this Satanic Creature! Come away, Jason. He’s clearly evil. (Oh, wait. Jason’s deaf. I forgot!) You’ll get that joke if you played the game. (For more of me ranting about this stupid game, listen to next week’s podcast.)

Take Off, Eh, Sarah

Okay, let’s talk about evil clowns. Thanks to my buddy Matt (who flatteringly called me “The Palintologist”), I learned that America’s favorite living joke Sarah Palin recently gave a talk in Canada, where she dropped this bombshell about her early days in Alaska:

We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada. And I think now, isn’t that ironic?

Yeah! (giggle) It is ironic. Some would prefer to call it a pathetic example of blatant hypocrisy, but “ironic” works too.

I also love this excerpt from and about a starstruck fan:

Stephanie Hansen, 18, who wore a pin with Ms. Palin’s face, could barely contain her excitement. [...] “I love it, I’m really glad that I came. It was really enlightening.”

She admitted she didn’t know a lot about Ms. Palin’s politics, but she said she loves her nonetheless.

“I admire how she can have a family and still be able to work as much as she does and everything she does.”

I mean, wow. To quote a classic lyric from Audio Two: What more can I say?

Goats and Corrosion and Beasties, Oh My!

Thanks also to my brother Mark for linking us to Exiled in the Land of the Free, an album you can download gratis to raise awareness about Oglala Sioux political prisoner Leonard Peltier. It features The Goats (a truly excellent rap group that only put out two albums, the first of which — Tricks of the Shade — rivals any Public Enemy or Paris or Coup disc for Best Political Rap Album Ever) and Corrosion of Conformity and The Beastie Boys and Rage Against the Machine and Helmet and many other cool bands.

TimeWaster™

If you’d like to know Leonard P’s story, you can watch the documentary film Incident at Oglala (91 minutes) right here via Google Video: